The Mexican citizen has patiently waited for years for a green card to allow him to come to the United States legally, even as millions of compatriots crossed the border illegally.

But his wait has been long. Very, very long.

Bojorquez was 14 when his father, Jesus Bojorquez, then a legal permanent resident, filed a green-card petition on his behalf. Alejandro is now 29.

Even after 15 years, Alejandro may have to wait five more before he can get a green card, as permanent-resident visas are known. By then, he will have waited 20 years to come to the U.S. His father is now a naturalized U.S. citizen and his mother, Guadalupe Bojorquez, moved to the U.S. four years ago when she became a legal resident. His parents live in Florence, where Jesus works on a farm.

Alejandro’s long wait is hardly unusual.

People trying to come to the U.S. legally often wait years, even decades, to get green cards. The wait is at the center of the highly contentious debate over whether to give the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally a pathway to citizenship as part of the sweeping immigration bill now in the Senate.

There were more than 4.4 million people waiting for green cards as of Nov. 1, according to a U.S. State Department report. Of those, 1.3 million were from Mexico. The total number, however, may be much higher, according to immigration experts.

The State Department does not count immigrants already in the U.S. with green-card applications pending. Including those, the total number of people waiting could be as high as 5.5 million, experts say.

The wait is long because the U.S. limits the overall number of green cards issued each year.

Limits by countries

The U.S. also restricts the number of green cards that can be handed to immigrants from the same country each year. That means would-be immigrants from countries such as Mexico that have high numbers of people trying to come to the U.S. wait the longest.

People like Alejandro Bojorquez.

“It’s been really hard,” said Bojorquez, who lives near Los Mochis, a city in the coastal state of Sinaloa, where he runs a small business making candy. Most of his family lives in Arizona, he said.

The sweeping immigration-reform bill under debate in the Senate attempts to strike a political compromise. The bill would allow illegal immigrants to receive temporary provisional legal status after certain border-security measures are met. But they would then have to wait 10 years at the “back of the line” before they could apply for green cards.

In the meantime, the government would work to clear the backlog of legal immigrants waiting for green cards.

“It’s a complicated political calculus,” said Madeleine Sumption, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. “One of the main issues in the debate has been this concern that legalization (of the undocumented) would ‘reward law breakers.’

“There was also a lot of concern about ‘jumping the line,’ that basically we have these long backlogs of people who wait legally,” she added. “Many lawmakers were uncomfortable with the idea that someone might get a visa faster if they had entered illegally.”

Currently, the U.S. allows about 226,000 immigrants per year to receive green cards through family-based petitions filed by relatives in the U.S. At that rate, it would take 19 years to clear the existing backlog of immigrants waiting for green cards, according to an analysis by Claire Bergeron, a research assistant at the Migration Policy Institute.

The bill, however, calls for clearing the backlog in seven years, beginning in fiscal 2015.

That would be a big challenge for the government, acknowledged U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” senators who crafted the bill.

“Measures are going to be taken” to clear the backlog, McCain said. “Now, whether they are going to be completely successful or not is not clear yet.”

Clearing the backlog has also drawn controversy. Immigrant advocates say the green-card backlog is the result of the nation’s broken immigration system, and clearing it would allow legal immigrants to reunite with family members in the U.S.

“These are people who have been waiting and do have a close family relationship. ... They are anchored here,” said Angela Kelley, vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank. “If they play by the rules, you shouldn’t be disadvantaged, and in this legislation, they won’t be.”

But critics are concerned that clearing the green-card backlog on top of legalizing many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants would flood the U.S. with millions of new workers who could drive down wages, compete for jobs with Americans, and drive up the costs of public benefits.

“It’s a very large increase in the eventual number of green cards and the eventual number of legal permanent residents, and I believe all together it will impose a very large cost on the U.S. taxpayer,” said Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Typically, legal immigrants who come to the U.S. on family-related visas have below-average education levels and therefore tend to use more in public benefits than they pay in taxes, Rector said.

More low-skilled immigrants would also compete not only with low-skilled Americans for jobs but also with immigrants already in the U.S. That could drive down wages for those workers, he said.

Studies have shown that “the group most negatively affected by future large flows of low-skilled immigrants are the current immigrant population that has the same skill level because they would compete most directly,” Rector said.

McCain said he understands the concern. But America needs more immigrant workers to help support the country’s aging population.

“I would point out that in 1955 there were 16 workers for every retiree. Now there’s three workers for every retiree,” McCain said. “In about 10 to 15 years, there’s going to be two workers for every retiree. ... I don’t think there is any doubt that over time we were going to need more people in the workforce.”

A report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday said the bill would boost the overall U.S. economy. The report said the bill would legalize about 8 million of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, and the additional workers would cut deficits by $197 billion over the first 10 years and $700 billion over the second 10 years.

Back of the line

Immigrants get green cards through two primary methods. An immediate relative who is already a legal permanent resident or a U.S. citizen has to apply on behalf of the immigrantthrough a family-sponsored petition. Or an immigrant has to have an employer sponsor him or her based on the immigrant’s talents, education or job skills.

Of the 4.4 million people outside the U.S. waiting for green cards, almost 4.3 million are waiting for family-sponsored petitions, according to the State Department. There are another 113,059 people outside the country waiting for employment-based green cards, according to the State Department. However, most people waiting for employment-sponsored green cards already live in the U.S., Sumption said. There could be as many as 1 million people waiting for employment-sponsored green cards, she said.

Not everyone has to wait in line. U.S. citizens who are over 21 can get green cards for their spouses, minor children and parents right away without having to worry about the green-card limits.

But everyone else applying for a family-sponsored green card or employment-sponsored green card has to wait. And there is not just one line. There are many, and would-be immigrants are assigned based on a variety of factors, ranging from age to country of residence.

The lines for green cards can be compared with the lines at Disneyland, where visitors need a ticket just to stand in the line to get in. And once inside, there are more lines to wait in, with the longest lines at the most popular rides.

It’s the same for green cards. An immigrant needs a relative or an employer to petition for them to get in the line for green cards. They then have to wait in another line depending on what category they fall under. Some lines are longer than others based on demand. And some move slower than others based on limits the U.S. sets for each category and for each country.

One of the longest lines is for the children of legal permanent residents.

As of Nov. 1, there were more than 220,313 people waiting for green cards in that line after a parent who immigrated to the U.S. and received a green card of their own filed a petition for them.

Alejandro Bojorquez started out in that line 15 years ago, when his father was a legal permanent resident and Alejandro was 12 and living with his mother in Mexico.His father got his green card under a 1986 law, signed by President Ronald Reagan, that granted amnesty to 1 million undocumented farmworkers. Alejandro’s mother got her green card four years ago.

But when Alejandro turned 21, the government automatically switched him to a different category, one for unmarried adult children of legal permanent residents. That line is even longer. There were 486,597 people waiting in that line as of Nov. 1, the State Department said.

In January, Jesus Bojorquez became a naturalized U.S. citizen. After that, Alejandro elected to switch to a different line, the one for unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens, because that line was shorter. There were 288,705 people waiting in that line as of Nov. 1.

There are other lines. The one for married adult sons and daughters of U.S. citizens has 830,906 people waiting for green cards.

There is also a line for siblings of adult U.S. citizens. That’s the longest line of all — 2.4 million people waiting for green cards.

And those are just the lines for people waiting for green cards through family-sponsored petitions. There are five more lines for people waiting for green cards through employment-sponsored petitions. The longest of them, the one for skilled workers, has nearly 100,000 people waiting, according to the State Department.

Processing ’93 petitions

So, when will Alejandro Bojorquez get his green card? That will be determined by his country and his “priority date” — the date his father filed the petition on his behalf, Jan. 8, 1998.

As of this month, the government was processing green-card applications for adult children of U.S. citizens from Mexico filed before Aug. 22, 1993.

But Bojorquez could be waiting much longer than the four years and five months his priority date would indicate. The U.S. says no country can receive more than 7 percent of the total number of green cards available for each particular year.

That means the line for green cards moves more slowly for immigrants from countries with lots of people applying than those from countries with fewer applicants. Country caps force immigrants from China, India, Mexico and the Philippines to wait the longest.

In addition to clearing the backlog of immigrants, the immigration-reform bill under debate in the Senate would eliminate the country caps.

That could speed up Bojorquez’s wait for a green card. In the meantime, however, he will keep his spot in the lengthy line.

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